Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Cynical info: the year it was up for a Hugo, it was distributed free at Worldcon; members got a free copy when they showed up and the opportunity to vote for it that weekend.
This doesn't guarantee a win (and it had to get nominated long before that), but it does make it close to guaranteed that the voting pool was at least *familiar* with that book, whereas the other nominees might be ones they'd just heard about or not even that.
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See
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/07/hugo-nominees-1993
for some discussion.
But as I remember it the book was very well known in fandom so you do not need to get a free book to know about the book and that a lot of people had recommended it and that it had got very good reviews and won other prices.
Also, Connie Willis is a very well known and liked person. So personal popularity is a better theory especially for the fact that the crappy Connie Willis books that won the Hugo this year. But I think that Doomsday Books was actually a very good book.